I caught up with artist Sophie Glover after her show with Soho Revue.
Photo: Sophie Davidson
Congratulations on your recent show at Soho Revue. How did that show come about?
Thank you! The lovely Charlie Siddick came for a studio visit and asked if I’d put a couple paintings in. The show was about spaces that hold memories, which felt very apt for one of my still lives.
This is the still life reflecting your time spent at your last house? Can you tell me about that painting?
Yes, I think I make my still lives as a way to understand life better - a way of summing up time. That’s why lots of motifs get repeated; they are placeholders for my experiences. So the postcard, the letter, the garden plans, the anaemic bowl of fruit, the ants, the crow, the green phone, Jack Bardwell’s compression drawing or my Grandma’s self-portrait each have a story to tell, but I’ll let you imagine what those stories are.
A kind of Dutch Vanitas. A taking of stock. Does it feel cathartic to work with such personal subjects. Like a diary?
Indeed, I also kept thinking back to the phrase Nature Morte. Somehow, ‘Still Life’ in a different language broke my lazy associations with the term and formed new ones. Nature Morte feels like time frozen to me; a slither of life in stasis. To be able to parcel up time like this and trap it on a picture plane in front of me is incredibly cathartic, I feel lucky to have the chance.
Where do you see your work heading after the Soho Revue show?
Oh, definitely a solo show at Marlborough gallery, haha.
No.
I have a group show with Partnership Editions coming up in the Autumn with lots of new paintings. The title of the show is Emblems; thinking about repeating icons. This feels just right to be part of, as each of my paintings is made from the last, with symbols constantly reappearing; women sleeping heavy as rocks, chalky fruit or flowers frozen in still life and hands resting on tables of ephemera.
Placeholders, symbols, emblems. Are you putting these metaphors out in to the world as pure biography, or are they to be interpreted or used by the viewer to their own means?
It’s an interesting question because I really feel both are true. All I’m doing is painting biographically; doing it has become fundamental to my own experience of life. However, it’s quite something when someone tells you their own interpretation of your work. Suddenly your little beast has run off and created a new thought, something you didn’t envisage or intend, and that is quite, something.
It sure is. Where will the work be shown, or is it purely online?
It’ll be at 59 Lant Street in Bermondsey, opening 24th October!
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